Soup in the Summertime

I'm still in the mood to cook, so far so good. No issues have happened in the kitchen this week to make me feel like giving up yet.  So Saturday night with my spirits high it was time to get busy in the kitchen making soup.  I rarely make soup in the summer.  I think it's just something in my head that makes me think if it's hot outside than we shouldn't be eating soup.  This recipe looked too good to pass up, Spiced Coconut Lentil Soup.  No blender necessary which was a big plus. I hate having to pull the blender out of storage to make soup.

I minced the red onion in my food chopper (stored in the kitchen so it's not a hassle to use it) and put it in the dutch oven to saute with some coconut oil.  Let's stop here for a second.  I bought coconut oil during that $160 shopping trip that I made.  This stuff isn't cheap, $7.49.  I couldn't bring myself to taste it right out of the jar.  I tried, but it reminded me of candle wax or something else equally as unappealing.  So I'm not really sure if it helped with the flavor of the dish or not.  I figured it was a good investment since we make a ton of curries and Asian food and we can use it in place of other oils for that.  Apparently it's pretty good for your skin too and it's gives instructions on the jar for how to use it that way.

Then you add minced red chili (couldn't find a red chili so I used a hot pepper), ginger, and garlic and saute until the softened.  Now the recipe says for both of these steps (onion and chili, ginger, garlic) to cover while it's cooking.  I covered the onion and ended up burning it a little, so I wouldn't suggest covering it and I don't see why it's even needed. 

(sorry so blurry, I'm having some camera issues)

Next rinse your red lentils (which look more orange or pinkish in color) and add them to the pan with the spices ground coriander, cumin, and paprika, mix this well.  Add the coconut milk and water and crumble half of a vegetable bouillon cube into the pot; season with salt and pepper.  (I did not invest in pink Himalayan, not point in my opinion.) 

Cover the pan and bring it to a boil, than lower the heat so that you have a low simmer.  You will need to stir the soup a bit because the lentils could stick to the bottom of the pot.  Once the lentils have disintegrated (about 40 minutes), take the soup off the heat and stir in 1 lime's worth of lime juice.  Do not skip this step.  I tasted the soup before the lime juice and after.  It's so much better with the lime juice; it just gives it this extra depth that it needed. 

Final Product:

My thoughts:  Super good!  I loved everything about this soup.  The lime juice was perfect with the coconut milk and the lentils.  It was creamy and had a lot of flavor.  I served it with some sour dough bread, which was perfect to dip into the soup.  This recipe will be in heavy rotation.

Next up:  Budget Meals.  After overspending at Wegmans last week I can not afford to have the same thing happen again this week.  My first budget meal I will be testing out is Broccoli and Cheese Quiche.  Yes, I am on a bit of an egg kick, but eggs are soooo cheap. 

Coconut Poached Salmon

It’s been 4 days of alone time for me. Okay let’s be real I haven’t been alone for very long in the last 4 days. I’m typically a pretty busy person and it seems while Anthony is away that hasn’t changed. I went to a Cabi clothes party (very cute clothes, but way too expensive for me. I’m a firm believer in buying cheap clothes so that I don’t have to keep them for years!), dinner with friends at The Crab Shack (I had the clam bake), more dinner with friends at Beale Street (pulled pork sandwich), and then helping friends move. I got home Saturday night (after helping with the move) and needed to cook something for just me. The itch to cook was there and when the itch happens I must cook (simply because it doesn’t happen often and I wouldn’t want to pass up the chance to blog something).




I was pretty intrigued with what I was going to be cooking, salmon poached in coconut milk. Anything coconut just makes the salivating start. Poaching is something I don’t do very often. I’ve poached eggs just the one time for this blog and I’ve poached chicken for a soup that I make a lot. But I’ve never poached fish. I’m totally in love with the concept! Poaching means (in The Hesitant Cook dictionary): Letting a protein boil/simmer in liquid of some type and it not getting all dried out.


This Rachael Ray recipe was pretty easy to follow. As is typical, I forgot to buy something, in this case a lime. Oh well you can’t expect me to be on top of everything all the time. I also did not make this entire recipe because I was not in the mood for watercress. There is a possibility that I will make this again next week with the watercress, although by then I might find another way to cook salmon (I have one fillet left in the house. If you have a good way for me to cook it let me know.) Back to the recipe, you boil the chicken broth until it reduces by half. At that point you add the coconut milk, lime juice (which I did have on hand), lime zest (which sadly I didn’t have) and basil. Add the salmon and poach it for about 10 minutes. I’m not good at telling when salmon is cooked and I figured it wouldn’t dry out using this method so I poached it for the full 10 minutes. Meanwhile I used some of this rice (I’m not ashamed, I can’t cook rice!) and added some coconut milk to it and heated it on the stove.


The salmon and rice were both done and plated when I remembered that I still had to make the sauce! Oops! Luckily I had heated the plate in the microwave so my food stayed warm. The watercress part of recipe was throwing me off track and I thought I was finished. I brought the poaching liquid to a boil, dissolved the cornstarch with cold water and added it to the liquid. I whisked it until it was thickened and then poured in onto the salmon and rice.


Final Product: 

    

          (sorry my pictures are going to be sad since 

                      Anthony has the good camera!)

This was delicious. I ate the whole thing and I didn’t even realize I was that hungry! The fish was very moist. There was a flavor to it that I can’t describe, sorry I tried to come up with the word while eating it but I couldn’t. It was salty and a little sweet. Poaching fish is the way to go! I was very impressed with how moist the salmon turned out. I’m an over cooker and typically my salmon is on the dry side. This method of cooking is going to be something that I do more often. I encourage everyone to try it out. Even non-cooks like me can do this!


Now if only I could figure out why my grocery bill was eighty dollars! I’m only one person this week, how in the world could I have bought $80 worth of groceries? No meat was bought, no cleaning products, no shampoos or anything like that. Also I only bought ingredients for 4 dinners. Thinking back on what I bought I still can’t fathom why my bill was so high. One portabella and one eggplant couldn’t have done so much damage. It baffles me. Completely. Looks like this weekend I am going to the public market for my vegetables and seeing if that makes a difference. I’ll post a blog about the experience and let you know what I discover!


Tomorrow's blog post:  Pineapple and Jalapeno Pizza



Braised Chicken with Coconut Milk and Curry

Day 20-Something really is wrong with me, somebody should research me. Cooking and I are just not meshing. The basics are not even possible for me. I should just stick to easy recipes with few ingredients. Once I do those well for awhile, I should then move on to more complicated recipes. After last night I’ve completely lost all confidence in myself. If I felt it was okay to just give up and move on I would, but I don’t feel comfortable giving up. Being someone who gets bored easily I give up more often then not. The minute a task gets just a bit too hard and I can’t really grasp the concept, I quit.

Now this doesn’t apply to my entire life, just to hobbies that I’ve tried out. A perfect example is knitting. I knitted a few scarves and could never master finishing them off. Someone else always had to do it for me. Since it seemed impossible, I gave up on it. Last year I decided to start a walking/jogging/running program, it worked out for a couple of weeks, but then my knees started hurting and I couldn’t run for long, so I quit. When the going gets tough, I get out. It’s not that I don’t like to work at things, I really do. But if I believe I just can’t quite reach the skill level to really do something well, then what’s the point of continuing with it. Folks, my brain is starting to feel this way about cooking.

Last night started off badly. I left work and got caught behind an accident and didn’t get home until an hour later. (My drive is normally about 10-15 minutes.) So I was in a great mood once I got home. Then I was going to cook something completely different, until I realized that one of my ingredients had gone bad. So that was out. Switching my brain over to another recipe is not the easiest thing for me. I get so focused on what I was supposed to cook, that what I end up cooking suffers for it.

Finally I decided to make Braised Chicken with Coconut Milk and Curry and serve it with Spinach Rice. I found this recipe in Reader’s Digest and the picture of the chicken with the rice looked really appetizing. I had to do some digging to find the rice recipe since it wasn’t included in the magazine. The one good thing about this recipe is I discovered a new ingredient I’ve never used it before, Sofrito. The taste was good, kind of like a tomato sauce. So I’m assuming that if you want the flavors of onion, garlic, pepper and tomato in a Latin style dish you can add this. I bet it would be a good addition to ground beef for tacos. I could use it in place of the salsa I normally mix my beef with.

The chicken dish was actually fairly easy to make. It calls for a whole chicken broken down, but obviously I wasn’t going to do that, so I bought chicken thighs. Everything else went really well, I’m not going to bother boring you with the details of how to put it all together (use the link on to the right of this post to see the recipe). The chicken smells awesome while it’s cooking. It has my favorite ingredients of coconut milk and curry, which is one of the reasons I choose to make it. Although it reminds me a bit of an Indian dish, it’s labeled as a classic Latin dish. So while my chicken was becoming tender and filled with flavor I moved onto the rice.

This recipe was a tough one for me. There were parts of it that just didn’t make any sense to me. You start the dish by heating up a ¼ cup of canola oil in a pan. Then you add long grain white rice and salt and coat the rice in the oil. Once the rice looks opaque you: “add enough cold water to cover the rice by the width of 2 fingers (about 1-inch). Bring to a rapid boil, and boil-without stirring!-until the water level reaches the level of the rice. Stir the rice once and reduce the heat to low. Cover and cook 20 minutes.” This is where things went very wrong. I didn’t understand the 2 fingers equal an inch logic. So I poured in what I thought was an inch of water. Then I waited until the water looked like it had reached rice level, though I’m still not completely clear on what that means. Next I stirred it and threw the cover on. 20 minutes later, the rice wasn’t cooked at all! AT ALL!! I have no idea what really went wrong. All I know is that I wasted 4 cups of rice!! I made 4 cups in the hopes of bringing the leftovers to work. HA! I did manage to cook the spinach correctly so I still had that to work with. So Anthony suggested cooking up some instant rice and throwing the spinach in that with olive oil and butter. So I did and it worked out fine.

Final Product:

Just because this dinner was saved in the end, does not mean I am happy about it. I’m super annoyed about the rice. Did I not use enough water? Well, who would know with the crazy finger instructions?! Grrr Argh! The chicken was tasty. I would totally make it again, but forget about that rice. I would rather just cook up some basmati rice with this chicken dish. I would still add the spinach to the rice, because that was a nice addition. Anthony really liked this meal even with the instant rice and asked me why I don't make this more often. That's a good sign. Sorry there are not more pictures, but these two things kept me pretty busy and I couldn’t be bothered with the camera.

I’m supposed to be cooking again tonight, but I might retire the duties to Anthony. I feel so defeated. I need to work my way back into the cooking life slowly. Oh and here is a picture of the Black Bean Lasagna from the other night. It was not all the amazing and I think I'll just stick to the classic lasagna that I make well.